Thursday, 16 January 2014

I'm really annoyed with myself for ignoring the golden rule of 'measure twice, cut once' while trimming down my 'Gray Scale' challenge piece for International Threads. Instead of being 40 x 80 cm it is 38 x 80 and that missing 2m on the RH side would have made all the difference.

When I was on the Human Marks workshop with Dorothy Caldwell in Puglia, I took a photo of my index finger stained and ingrained with Indian ink after a morning of making fingerprint marks.
I manipulated the photo in Photoshop, dividing it into 6 overlapping sections, and printed it out on a commercial batik (with marks that reminded me of my fingerprints) treated with bubblejet set.
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Thursday, 9 January 2014

Until the end of January, my book 'Growing Orchids From Seed' ( and the Spanish edition) is available for half price from www.Kewbooks.com .
Even though I say it myself, it's a very good introduction - our lab copy is looking very tatty now it's used so much for training!

Wednesday, 1 January 2014

I sewed the facing on my 2nd quilt for Cwilt Cymru 'Connection' exhibition last night, finishing the hand stitching first thing this morning! The A4 handling samples for the 2 quilts 'Red Remnants' and 'Red Ripples' are also finished (above).
I've learnt a lot during the process of making these quilts to a deadline and apart from finishing my piece for International Quilt Challenge group , I don't have anything in the pipeline (apart from lots of ideas in my head).
I've been mulling it over the last few days and rather than making works for challenges/ competitions, what I want to achieve this year is to produce at least 3 pieces , building up a body of work, putting into practice what I've learnt over the last few years and then decide whether I enter them for shows.
It may well end up being a year I produce 2 sets of Journal Quilts - the CQ challenge for 2014 is for 8 x 8 inch, too small in my experience for developing samples - I'll stick to A4 for that purpose.
Wishing you all the best for 2014, whatever your plans.